I apologise for my earlier blunder.
You can see the whole story in my response to Angharad's Blog post.
Tossing the outlier seen below, the mean word count for Easy as Falling Off a Bike is: 973825 words, rounded to the nearest integer.
According to Word Count, Episode 704 added approximately 1033 words to the above estimate, and it's obviously only an estimate.
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Here are the results for four different tools, up to and including part 703:
Open Office Counts:
993,426 Words An obvious outlier
Microsoft Word counts:
974,992 Words
BBEdit (a text-based editor for programmers) counts:
973,743 Words
Word Count* counts:
972,739 Words
One instantly notes that no two of these agree with each other. Go figure.
Iechyd da,
Liobhan
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This has certainly been a lesson for me.
Never trust anything.
* A dedicated utility for the Mac that does nothing but count words.
Comments
Word Count
I think it should be asked what do you consider a word? For wc (word count - a unix utility that counts characters, words and lines in a file), words are anything containing characters broken up by white space. So "amazing-stuff" would count as one word even though it's actually two words separated by a hyphen. I'd hazard a guess that MS and OpenOffice are closest to actually being correct, differing only in their dictionaries and what they consider a 'word'.
--Aimee Michelle
Simulating this process by hand
through converting all non-alphabetic/numeric characters -- including hyphens and em-dashes -- into spaces, then collapsing all runs of spaces into single spaces, and then counting the spaces, I make it:
972,034 words
I quite like that one, since I can specify what counts as a word.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Weird but true
Bike is not the longest story posted on BC. :) There are, I think, three that are longer in total words and one that is close.
Of course, with 300 more chapters, about 400,000 more words, Angharad's opus would be in a close contest for SECOND longest story on BC. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Would you kindly
Make a short list of The Longest Stoties please.
Faraway
Faraway
Big Closet Top Shelf
Where you can fool around like you want to and most you get is some bemused good ribbing!
Not numbers, please!
All I know is that when I finally started to read "Bike", it took me a month or so to read the entire thing. GAD ! Once, I was so engrossed that it was 2:00 AM or so before I stopped. I read a lot, and I would say that Bike is equivalent to a stack of books taller than a milk carton.
Now, I am going to have to sit and wait for new episodes like the rest of you plonkers. :(
Khadija